1 Metric You Need To Check To Achieve Social Media Success

When it comes to social media marketing, the analytics can often get overlooked. It’s hard enough coming up with new ideas and creating enough content to keep your feed updated, without having to go through the 101 sets of analytical data as well.

Which is why in this article I’m going to explain why checking your social media analytics is so important, how the data will help you achieve your goals and the one metric you need to check to achieve social media success.

How To Measure For Social Media Success

When I’m setting up new campaigns for my clients, data from their social media channels is really important to me. I use it to determine what type of content their target audience is into. Without data I don’t know if what I’m doing is working. If I don’t know what’s working I can’t plan effective campaigns.

So, like I said data is really important to me. And it needs to be really important to you too. When you run your own business, you have to wear all the hats, and marketing manager is one of them. So you have to learn to love data, just like me.

If you’d just spent a large amount of money getting brochures designed and printed, you wouldn’t just through them out of a window in the hope that one will land in front of someone that needs your service or product.

Well, spending large amounts of time keeping your social media channels updated and not checking your analytics is the same thing.

You need to check in with your data, or you might as well be throwing expensive brochures out the window.

Why Social Media Analytics Are So Important

Checking your analytics is the only way to tell if you’re achieving your goals. When you monitor your progress you can determine what’s working and what’s not working, so you can do more of the stuff that is working and non of the stuff that isn’t.

The two charts below show the differences in your success rate between not checking your data and using a data driven approach to your social media marketing.

Without Data

The chart of the left shows peaks and troughs in your social media success. Some of your content will work well, and some posts will flop. But because you don’t know the difference, you keep posting out both types of content. What you’ll notice is that over time you’re campaigns are not actually making any progress.

With Data

The chart to the right is what your social media success will look like when you do check your data. You’ll be able to see the content that is working so you can make more of it, and only post that type of content. By doing this you will begin to see exponential growth from your campaign success.

Social Media Is Like An Olympic Athlete

I want you to think of your social media channels like an Olympic athlete. This is Lizzy, she’s our star skeleton racer in this years winter olympics.

It’s her goal as an olympic athlete to win a gold medal, and how does she win a gold medal? By training really hard. How does she know if she’s training hard enough to win a gold medal? She has to track her progress by timing her practice runs.

By timing her practice runs, Lizzy will know what training is working and what’s not. So she can include more of what’s working into her training sessions and stop wasting energy on the other stuff.

Social media is the same. Your goal for being present on social media is to tell more people about what you do by building a loyal and engaged following. How do you build a loyal and engaged following? You have to fill your feed with right type of content. How do you know if your creating the right content? You need to check your analytics.

By checking your analytics, you’ll know what content is working so you can create more of it and achieve of your goal of building a loyal and engaged following.

Creating the right content is key to the success of your social media.

What do you need to check to make sure your creating the right content?

To make sure your creating the right content, all you need to check is your Post Engagement Rate.

What is your post engagement rate?

Your post engagement rate is the metric that measures the level of engagement that a piece of content gets from your audience. That engagement or interaction can be via a like, a share, a comment or a click.

Your post engagement rate will tell what posts are more popular than others and what content is resonating with your audience enough for them to engage with it. You can then take the formula from your top post and include it in your content strategy.

By only including your ‘top post’ formula in your feeds, you will increase your engagement rate. And great things happens when you increase your engagement rate.

When you increase your engagement rate, you will:

Communicate better with your audience

Increase your organic reach

Achieve your goal of building a bigger loyal and engaged following

Create better sponsored content

How do you monitor your post engagement rate?

The great thing about post engagement rate is that you can track it using the social channels built in analytics tools. You don’t need to use any third party tools. Everything you need to know is on the platform your using. Easy peasy.

Here’s and example of what post engagement rates look like on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I’ve highlighted my top performing posts on all three channels. And I did this in less than 10 minutes.

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

Now with my top performing posts highlighted I can take a closer look and figure out what is about them that made them so engaging.

Your post doesn’t have to have hundreds of likes and shares to be your top performer either. What you’re looking to do is to create a data baseline to build on.

So, for you, a post with 4 likes might stand out from the rest, and this would be your top performing post. This post with the winning formula for engagement is your data baseline and what you need to learn from and build on.

Here’s what I found out from my top performing posts:

Instagram – My Instagram followers are more engaged when I post personal content. Content that includes my opinion, a personal story or something I’ve found interesting.

Facebook – My Facebook followers are more engaged with helpful content. Posts that explain how to do something, links to blog articles and other information online that can help them be better at digital marketing.

Twitter – My Twitter followers are more engaged with industry news. They like to know what’s going on in the world of digital marketing. Are there any upcoming events, changes to platforms, new technology or news on industry leaders.

Winning Formula For Your Content Strategy

Just by taking 10 minutes to check the engagement rate of my posts, I’ve found out that I need to be producing more personal content for Instagram, more ‘How To’ style posts on Facebook and more Industry news on Twitter. That information will form the basis of my social media content strategy.

When I produce more of this content on these channels I will increase my engagement rate, increase my organic reach and start achieving my goal of building a bigger following.

Lets Recap

Here’s what will happen when you start checking in with your social media analytics:

Stop creating content that no one is engaging with

Find the top performing posts on your social media channels

Use the formula from your top performing posts in all your future campaigns

Build on the success of those campaigns

See you engagement rate and organic reach go up

Achieve your goal of building a loyal following

Learn from that following to create even better content for your social media channels

And you can do all of this by monitoring just one thing – your post engagement rate.

This is a data driven approach to social media marketing.

This is how you will achieve social media success.

Other Data Worth Knowing

To show you what analytics dashboards look like on different social media platforms, I’ve created this free downloadable ‘Measuring For Social Media Success’ guide.

It navigates you through the built in analytics tools on the top 5 platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn, and outlines the most important data you need to be checking using easy to follow screen shots.